I've only heard fragments of Blacher's music,  but he seems to have been a distinctive and individual voice,  and an important teacher of other composers.  Quite aside from the specifically music-related topics, I have personal interests in what was going on culturally in Harbin (where Blacher worked) in the 1920s...  when Harbin became a centre of "White Russian" culture, for those who had been forced eastwards (voluntarily or otherwise) by the events of the Russian Civil War.  I would be fascinated to find out about any cross-fertilisation between the extremely diverse personalities who were working in Harbin at the time (Blacher, Vertinsky, Chaliapine, etc) - although Blacher was actually born in Northern China, so he was a second-generation emigre (I've always presumed him to be the son of German merchant-class family - Germany had whole strings of western-style supermarkets in Far-Eastern Russia and China at this time).  [Harbin, btw, is the least Chinese-looking city in China... its city-centre was built up by the Russian emigres, and consists of a huge main shopping street lined by style-moderne buildings, owned and built by the emigre community.  This street was pedestrianised by the Harbin City Administration about 10 years ago and the facades (although not the interiors) of these buildings were substantially restored - despite intensive damage done to them during the Cultural Revolution.]

Blacher seems to have had the singular bad luck to have been repressed by both the Communists (in China) and the Nazis in his native country    I wonder who Blacher's own teachers were?   I presume there was an extensive community of artists and musicians (including many jews, who had found fellow-cause with the Whites once Stalin's antisemitic purges began) resident in Harbin, which rivalled only Paris as the home of the Russian-community-in-exile?  The story - if there is one? - of Chinese involvement in classical music in Harbin at this time was largely ripped-up by the Cultural Revolution,  and getting any information on it now seems a near-impossible task    Although information about the European involvement in Harbin's history is no longer suppressed, it's certainly not a topic which interests the local government.  I managed to find a local guide in Harbin who was the granddaughter of one of Denikin's officers who'd avoided capture and fled there,  but the information is already third-hand and scanty.  The last of the Russian refugees - who were all declared "stateless" and living in abject poverty, not entitled to a pension or any state assistance in China, despite residency since 1922 - died in 1997.  We did at least manage to identify the concert-hall of the former "Embassy" of the Russian Government In Exile (later closed-down by the Kuomintang, of course) where Chaliapine had given his concerts.  I presume Blacher's music must have been performed there too?   The building is now a seedy 2* hotel and the former concert-hall is a grim self-service restaurant.   Vertinsky's song "The Sarasaty Romance" is set in the concert-hall, and describes a real-life incident in which Vertinsky found a Romanian violinist (whom he doesn't name) beating-up his own wife backstage after giving an applauded performance of the Romance for the public - the song's ending suggests that Vertinsky then hit the violinist full in the face.

What a fascinating thing - I had never come across the work at all.

You might have known this, or perhaps the booklet says - but "Furstin Tarakanowa" translates as "Countess Cockroach".

Extremely interesting stuff indeed! 

You're a prince among men

I don't want to impose on your time!  But I enjoyed that overture, there's clearly "something" in his music...    As you know, my professional interests are in theatre music,  but anything else you may have of Blacher's might be interesting

By luck or judgement, Mr Grew, you've hit upon the same thing I wrote of earlier... the extent to which he was influenced by his contemporaries in Harbin in the 30's before returning to Germany post-WW2.   I am not sure to which genre Alexander Vertinsky properly belongs...  he was primarily a cabaret performer.  Some of his songs could slot into the "jazz idiom" quite easily.  The "Magnolia Tango" was his most successful recording - he was fond of relating an anecdote against himself, referring to the late evening when some rather inebriated Englishmen pressured him to encore "The Magnolia Tango" when he was living in poverty in Paris, exiled from both the USSR and then China too. One Englishman said it was "his mother's favourite record" - it later emerged this personage was the Prince Of Wales.  Yet other songs by Vertinsky have passed into the art-song repertoire.

As far as I understand from the historical context, the 20s and 30s were wild times indeed in certain "europeanised" Chinese cities (Shanghai being the epitome of such bohemianism) and there may have been a mixture of social pressure, fashion, and economic necessity brought to bear on Blacher to write in the jazz idiom too?   It's somewhat forgotten that jazz was most popular in pre-WW2 Russia  (Stalin loved jazz, and demanded that Russia form a copycat version of the Comedian Harmonists - the Leningrad Vocal Jazz Quintet).  It's more than certain that the Russian emigres (who must have constituted 90% of Blacher's audiences, as they formed such a percentage of Europeans living and dominating Harbin's cultural life) would have taken jazz there with them.  At first they were merely traders and settlers working beyond Russia's somewhat porous border with Imperial China - after 1917 Harbin became a place where culture being repressed "at home" could continue to flourish.  Russian Style Moderne barely exists in Russia, since it was snuffed-out as effete bourgeouis nonsense by the Comrades - Harbin is the only place it was brought to a high level of refinement.


A Chinese advertisement for Hennessy cognac from 1934, which shows at least one side of life amongst the emigres.  The elderly gent in the background is almost certainly supposed to be Bernard Shaw,  who spent some time working in Shanghai in 1933.  Another British temporary resident was Noel Coward, who wrote "Private Lives" whilst staying at the Colonial Hotel in Shanghai.  The besuited asian clients in the picture aren't Chinese, of course - they are Japanese, who were exercising great influence in the  Shanghai Bund at the time.